Body Politic

by Paul Johnston

  “No, but since she had an authorisation, there should be a reference in the rosters.”

  “I don’t suppose you can remember which directorate stamped her authorisation?” I knew before I’d finished the question that a positive answer was about as likely as the Supply Directorate doubling the sugar ration.

  “I’m back on watch in a few minutes,” Taggart said, collecting the crockery like a good auxiliary.

  I needed to squeeze him a bit more. Whatever the Council thought about the ENT Man, I knew for a fact he wasn’t at work again. But there were similarities in the modus operandi, Hamilton was right about that. I was going to have to carry out my own private investigation into the bastard’s background. That meant doing what Taggart wanted and talking about the old days. I felt sick.

  “What were you saying before about the Howlin’ Wolf gang?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could. “Did you ever hear what happened to the survivors?”

  Taggart didn’t show any surprise at the question. I saw he was the kind of veteran auxiliary who spent most of his free time boring the arses off his younger colleagues with tales of his heroic past. “I saw one of them the other day,” he said, screwing his eyes up as if the coincidence stung him like an onion. I knew the feeling. “A pal of mine was in charge of a squad of prisoners clearing rubble at Fettes. I recognised him from the tattoo on his arm. They all had them, remember? This one’s said ‘Leadbelly’. Christ knows why.”

  Christ and me. They were all blues freaks. The Ear, Nose and Throat Man had “Little Walter” on his arm. I suppose they thought that was really funny.

  Taggart would have gone on for hours, but he had his shift and I had my lead.

  It was obvious from Davie’s face when I got back to the Land-Rover that he hadn’t got much out of his fellow auxiliaries. At least he was wearing a new watch.

  The sheer walls of the Assembly Hall loomed out of the mist like a smoke-blackened Aztec sacrifice pyramid. I jumped out as soon as Davie stopped and sprinted into the building. Arriving late for a Council meeting was a good way to commit suicide. I’d been working in the archives and had lost track of time.

  The medical guardian was on his feet when I got into the chamber.

  “Never mind explaining, citizen,” said the deputy senior guardian, raising her hand. “Our colleague has been giving us the results of the tests he ran on the victim. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be much help.”

  That didn’t come as much of a surprise. I was too busy being relieved that the senior guardian was absent again.

  Yellowlees looked at me without blinking, then acknowledged the speaker’s remarks. “I’m afraid that’s the substance of it. From the tests I can at least say that Knox 96 was in good physical condition and was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol of any kind. Nor did I find any trace whatsoever of the murderer – no hairs, blood, skin, semen. And no traces from the ligature. I can place the time of death between five and six a.m. from the potassium level in the vitreous humour.” He looked around at Hamilton. “I can also confirm that there were traces of spermicide from a standard-issue condom in the guardswoman’s rectum.”

  Hamilton was gazing unperturbed into the middle distance. Behind him was a board with photographs of the ENT Man’s victims. That didn’t exactly raise my spirits.

  The speaker was trying to attract my attention. “Have you made any progress, citizen Dalrymple?”

  “Not much. The medical guardian was lucky. At least he had a body to work on.” I looked round the horseshoe table. The guardians suddenly found their papers more interesting than me. Which wound me up even more. “All I got was the best-cleaned shithouse in the city.”

  That got their attention. They probably hadn’t heard one of those words for a long time. “I’ll tell you this. I reckon there are going to be more killings. The bodies must be left where they’re found. I haven’t got a chance otherwise.”

  Some of them looked like they weren’t too surprised to hear that.

  “All right, citizen, you’ve made your point,” said the deputy senior guardian drily. “Your report, please.”

  “I’ve been working on the victim’s background.” I saw Hamilton move his eyes upward dismissively. That was all the confirmation I needed to keep some of what I’d discovered to myself. “There’s nothing irregular. I also spent some time with the auxiliaries from the public order directorate who handled the case before I was brought in. Again, there’s nothing significant to report. Fingerprints found in the lavatory and corridor are either those of cleaners, who all have sound alibis, or are not registered in the archives, indicating they belong to tourists. There’s no shortage of those in Stevenson Hall every night. The hotels have been checked and they all report that their residents were in by the tourist curfew of 0300.”

  “What’s the point of all this?” Hamilton demanded, jerking his thumb at the board behind him. “We know who the killer is.”

  “Hardly,” said Yellowlees. “Even if the ENT Man has started killing again, we don’t have any idea of his identity.”

  The speaker raised her hand. “One moment. Are we to understand there is some doubt that the Ear, Nose and Throat Man is involved?”

  “Absolutely none,” said Hamilton, as firmly as a member of the Inquisition who’d just been asked if there was any possibility Galileo could be right about the solar system.

  The deputy senior guardian didn’t buy it. She turned to me. “Citizen?”

  It was a tricky one. Life would have been a sight easier if I’d told them what happened to the ENT Man. They probably wouldn’t even have thrown me into the cells for keeping quiet about it for five years. At least until I caught this killer. But it wasn’t just my secret. It was all I still shared with Caro, lost beautiful Caro, whose photo, thank Christ, was obscured by Hamilton’s head.

  “We’re waiting,” prompted the speaker, her voice sharper.

  I let Caro fade away. And decided to keep our secret. “Well, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the modus operandi. The ENT Man removed organs from his victims, but he also took their ears and blocked their noses, sometimes with earth, other times with pieces of cloth.”

  “He may have run out of time in Stevenson Hall,” said Hamilton.

  “You think so? This murder looks to me like a carefully calculated killing. The person who did this knew how to avoid the patrols and gain entry to a protected building.”

  “Whereas the otolaryngologist,” said the medical guardian, his fingers forming a pyramid under his chin as he repeated the term, “the otolaryngologist tended to keep out of the way of guard personnel.”

  Except in two cases, I thought.

  “As I remember,” the shrivelled finance guardian said, “he didn’t clean up after himself either.” The old man glanced at the photos and twitched his lips.

  Hamilton was shaking his head. “The woman was strangled, mutilated and sodomised. What more evidence is necessary?”

  “Evidence that will enable citizen Dalrymple to catch him,” said the deputy senior guardian. “There seems to be precious little of that.” She looked at me again. “If you are dubious that it is the same killer, what grounds do you have for expecting more murders?”

  It was a good question. They might give the impression of inhabiting a world light years away from the rest of us, but there’s nothing wrong with the guardians’ intellects. Except perhaps the public order guardian’s.

  “There was an outburst of serial killing in the years before the UK broke up. I read all the reports. The likelihood of a murderer who gets away with a killing of this kind doing it again is overwhelming.” I was trusting a hunch as well, but I didn’t think that would impress them.

  “You’d better make sure you catch him then,” said Hamilton grimly. “I propose that we increase the number of patrols in the tourist area at night. And that we continue to suppress all news of the guardswoman’s death.”

  “You realise that every auxiliary in the city knows
about it by now,” I observed, giving him a grim look of my own.

  “Auxiliaries are sworn servants of the city,” said the speaker loftily. “They will not divulge the news to ordinary citizens.”

  And a formation of pigs had just been spotted over Arthur’s Seat. “Even if they don’t,” I said, “it’s possible that the killer needs publicity. By denying him that we may increase the chances of him doing it again.” They all looked at me sternly. “Let’s face it, censoring the news of the ENT Man’s activities didn’t exactly help us catch him.”

  I caught a glimpse of the bust of Plato at the rear of the chamber. The Enlightenment used his ideas as the basis of the new constitution and they’re still debated every week in all the barracks. “You’re the students of human nature,” I said, trying to provoke a response. None of them reacted. It looked like I had them where I wanted. “By the way, I’ve taken on a guardsman as my assistant.”

  Hamilton was as reliable as one of Pavlov’s dogs. His eyes sprang wide open and his fists clenched.

  “Hume 253 is his barracks number,” I continued. “He’ll report to me alone during the investigation. No objections, I hope.”

  If the deputy senior guardian disapproved of my tone, she concealed it. Which is more than can be said for the public order guardian. Now he looked like a dog that had just been fed something worse than standard-issue haggis.

  I hadn’t finished with them. “It seems to me that we’re failing to address the most important question raised by this case.”

  “No doubt you’re about to tell us what that is,” said Hamilton in a strangulated whisper.

  I closed my notebook and stood up. “You’re right, guardian – I am. What’s behind the timing? It’s five years since the ENT Man last killed. Suddenly his modus operandi is repeated in part and a guardswoman is murdered in Stevenson Hall in the early morning of 20 March 2020. Why?”

  Back at my flat I cleared everything off the table and sat down to turn dross into gold. As I told the Council, the archives had yielded nothing worth reporting. I’d a faint hope that I would find some detail that had been omitted from the barracks documentation concerning the dead woman. Even a juicy big Public Order Directorate stamp showing that something had been censored would have done – then I could have squeezed Hamilton about it. But there was nothing. It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that I was as much at sea as the owl and the pussycat. At least they had a pea green boat.

  The knock on the door came as a relief. I assumed it would be Davie, then with a shock I remembered Katharine Kirkwood. Maybe she couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Her brother had been missing from my thoughts as well as from his flat. Still, the idea of laying eyes on her again was not unpleasant. I was disappointed.

  “Billy?” I tried and failed to sound unsurprised.

  “Quint, how the hell are you?” The short figure in a beautifully cut grey suit and pink silk shirt pushed past me. On his way he rammed a brand of malt whisky I hadn’t seen for a decade into my hands.

  “Christ, Billy, how did you find me?” I closed the door. “More to the point, after all this time, why did you find me?”

  “I’m pleased to see you too. What kind of a welcome is that, for fuck’s sake? I’m your oldest friend.” William Ewart Geddes, Heriot 07, one hundred and ten pounds of financial genius and calculating bastard, walked into the centre of the room and looked around under the naked light bulb. “Nice place you’ve got here, Quint,” he said with a sardonic grin. “I see you’ve still got your guitar. Not being a naughty boy and playing the blues, I hope.”

  There was a time when Billy was as fanatical about B.B. King and Elmore James as I am, but that was before the Council banned the blues on the grounds that music has to be uplifting or some such bollocks. The fact that most of the drugs gangs idolised bluesmen had nothing to do with the decision, of course.

  “No, I haven’t played for years,” I said. “Not since I was demoted.” I opened the whisky and inhaled its peaty breath. “That’s the last time I saw you as well. Why the sudden interest?”

  Billy accepted a chipped glass reluctantly and sipped the spirit neat, his small grey eyes blinking. The sparse beard that covered his thin face showed definite signs of officially disapproved clipping.

  “You know how it is,” he said. “No fraternisation between auxiliaries and ordinary citizens.” He grinned again, showing suspiciously even teeth. “Still, you’ve had time to cool off. And now I hear you’re back in favour—” He broke off to examine the small, blurred photo of Caro on the wall, the sharpness in his expression dissipating. The three of us had been at the university together. He looked like he was going to say something about her, but the glare I gave him made him change his mind.

  “As for finding you, that was easy. I’m deputy finance guardian, remember. All I had to do was pull your rates sheet.” He sat down gingerly on the sofa after inspecting it for anything that might damage his suit. Personally I’d have stayed upright if I’d been him.

  “Deputy finance guardian? You look more like a stockbroker. Remember them?”

  Billy laughed. “The clothes are nothing. You should see my flat.”

  “No, thanks. I’m only a citizen. Luxury’s bad for my character.” So’s jealousy. I couldn’t resist having a go at him. “Or so they used to say in the Enlightenment, didn’t they?”

  “Something like that,” Billy mumbled, his cheeks reddening. The party had alway taken second place to his personal ambitions. Obviously they were now in the process of being achieved. “Listen, Quint, how about a night on the town? I’ve got a car.”

  “You’re full of surprises.”

  “There’s a new nightclub in Rose Street.”

  “Nightclub? You mean a place where semi-naked women prance around and tourists pay inflated prices for shitty whisky?”

  “So you’re interested.” Billy raised an eyebrow. “You’ll need a change of clothes.”

  I drained my glass. “I’ll wear a tutu if I have to.”

  As I dragged my only suit out of the wardrobe, I almost managed to convince myself that I was only going because I wanted to find out why Billy had turned up after five years. But as I always turned the light out during sex sessions, it was also a long time since I’d seen a woman in anything less than a layer of off-white Supply Directorate underwear. Men are animals.

  The Toyota that Billy drove might well have been the newest vehicle in the city. I decided against asking him where he found the petrol to run it. He’d either have ignored the question or revealed some deal I didn’t want to know about. The Council banned the private ownership of cars because it was unable to negotiate a favourable price with the oil companies for anything except poor quality diesel. I wondered what its members thought about the deputy finance guardian’s wheels. I had a flash of the clapped-out 2CV he used to have when we were students. The problem then wasn’t obtaining fuel, it was finding somewhere to park. Now Lothian Road stretched ahead of us like a long deserted runway whose controller had turned the landing lights on in the forlorn hope of attracting some passing trade. Looking around, I realised that the fog was less thick.

  Billy accelerated hard down the hill past Stevenson Hall and jerked a thumb. “It happened in there, didn’t it?”

  I might have known. He wanted me to fill him in about the murder. I fed him some scraps which he accepted impassively but which, I was sure, he was storing away in his memory. At school Billy was famous for his ability to memorise pages of material in seconds. Coupled with his business acumen, that had sent him straight into the Finance Directorate in the early years of the Council.

  “Your parents all right?” he asked as he swung the car into the pedestrian precinct of Rose Street and acknowledged the guardsman who waved him through. When we were boys, Billy was a constant presence in our house in Newington. His own parents were divorced.

  “Growing old with about as much grace as those archbishops the mob walled up in St Paul’s years ago –
the old man especially.” Then I remembered that the next day was Sunday. Despite the investigation, I’d have to find time for the weekly visit.

  “Don’t suppose you see much of your mother,” Billy said as he pulled up. “Right, let’s get in amongst them.”

  The Bearskin was brightly lit. A pair of hypothermic girls wearing tartan shorts and crowned by headgear consistent with the club’s name flanked the entrance. Placards in a variety of languages laid out the treats in store for prospective customers: live music (“the hottest in the city”), top quality food and the widest selection of beer and whisky in Edinburgh, as well as a floorshow Bangkok would supposedly have envied in the years before its decline.

  Billy pushed through the mass of Chinese and Middle Eastern men – I couldn’t see any female customers – and led me in without any money or ID appearing. The manager, despite his dinner jacket, smoothly shaved face and slicked-back hair, was an auxiliary, like most of the staff in clubs and casinos.

  “Come on, Quint, I’ve got a table at the front.” Billy went down a short flight of steps towards a thick curtain. It was opened by a beaming girl with dead eyes. Her skirt would only cover her knickers if she stood very still. A wave of sound broke over us.

  The activities on stage were hard to avoid. Billy was already at a table, eagerly following the spectacle. I tried to play it cool, but my eyes were drawn all the same. The place was packed, the audience making almost as much noise as the band, whose members all wore kilts. A banner above proclaimed they were the only jazz band in the world with a bagpiper. Fortunately he seemed to have the night off.

  We were very close to the tangle of limbs on the stage. The costumes suggested that the scene was set in the sixteenth century. Most of them were strewn across the floor. Mary, Queen of Scots, her petticoats lifted over her back, was being penetrated from the rear by a wiry young man presumably meant to be her secretary Rizzio. As the music rose to a crescendo, he withdrew, flipped his royal partner on to her back and started to tear off her remaining clothes to the raucous accompaniment of the crowd.